What does healthy actually look like?

Did the #fatkini trend actually help?

This summer, thousands of 'plus size' women have taken to Twitter to post pictures of themselves in their swimwear, using the tongue-in-cheek hashtag #fatkini. Gemma Collins, fashion designer and TOWIE cast member, jumped on the bandwagon this week saying she was 'proud' of the online movement.

The usual blustering huffer puffers took to social media and the press in their droves to lament what they saw as the 'normalisation' of obesity, declaring Gemma and her ilk to be 'unhealthy' and therefore unfit (quite literally) to be role models.

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As is my wont during any occasion when 'promotion of obesity' type scaremongering happens, I rolled my eyes dramatically, banged my head against the wall a couple of times and then got on with my day. It seemed obvious to me that, in what is still indisputably a thin-worshipping culture, it would be literally impossible to bombard a person with so much plus-sized imagery that they found themselves cramming hamburgers into their mouth, labouring under the delusion that this was the fast-track to a fixed notion of beauty. This was, in my humble, nothing more than the innocent celebration of bodies who fall outside what it deemed to be 'normal' and therefore to be applauded. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

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Now, let's rewind. Let's imagine there was a #thinkini hashtag, involving very slender women posting images designed to 'inspire' and support each other. What might my reaction have been then? Knowing as I do how the 'thinspiration' phenomenon functions within eating disorders, I'd have to say I'd be very worried about the potential impact such a hashtag might have. Which makes me, on paper at least, a hypocrite.

There are plenty of slim and petite women who do not starve themselves, just as there are plenty of overweight women who eat well and take regular exercise. Which brings us on to the eternal conundrum (and one currently being discussed at length at the All Parties Parliamentary Group meetings I attend on body image) – what does health actually look like?

When I posed this question on Twitter, I received numerous responses along the lines of "health is about happiness and balance", "health is a feeling", "health is about an inner glow". These sentiments are both heart-warming and true. Yet we all know that there is a responsibility for fashion, beauty and fitness advertisers to use models who exist within a 'healthy' spectrum and we cannot enforce this obligation unless we are first able to define it.

We can't make huge sweeping assumptions about a person's lifestyle simply by looking

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'Perceived health' is a fascinating concept. Take, for example, my own (very brief) modelling career. I was a size 8-10 and severely bulimic. Yet, because of my relatively 'large' (ha!) size, I was deemed to be a healthier representation of beauty than models at the same agency who were naturally a size 6. In this instance, the actual state of my health was not as important as the public perception of it. For this reason, when agents claim to have conducted 'rigorous' health checks on their models in order to certify that they are eating disorder-free, it is ultimately meaningless if their image goes on to provide 'thinspiration' for people suffering from these illnesses.

Let's take an extreme and unlikely scenario and say the government stepped in and declared the spectrum of 'perceived health' to be, say, from a size 8 to a size 18. This would be the easiest way to ensure good practice in the advertising industry. Yet imagine the (justified) outcry from all the women who fell outside those parameters and were perfectly healthy. Imagine the financial and moral implications of excluding these women from public representations of beauty. Imagine also the possible ramifications – It's already difficult for people who are naturally overweight and underweight to be given appropriate medical care, because any ailment is automatically attributed to their weight, whether associated or not. If the media is given authority to reinforce this way of thinking this then the situation will only become worse. This clearly isn't the way forward.

So, the question remains - what does healthy look like? The honest answer is even I, after almost a decade of body confidence campaigning, do not definitely know.

I DO know that 'healthy' can exist within a diverse spectrum of shapes and sizes. I know that it is possible to look 'healthy' while leading an unhealthy lifestyle, and vice versa. Ultimately, I know that visual assessments of health are both inaccurate and unhelpful.

We can't make huge sweeping assumptions about a person's lifestyle simply by looking. Yet I think it's worth bearing in mind that any time we condemn an image as promoting an 'unhealthy' body type, we are by default suggesting that there is a fixed idea of how 'healthy' looks. Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that there isn't.

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